Other References
Zellweger, Paul. xe2x80x9cWeb-based Sales: Defining the Cognitive Buyer.xe2x80x9d International Journal of Electronic Markets. Vol. 7 No. 3, 1997. pp. 16-22.
Zellweger, Paul. The Knowledge Tree. unpublished paper, copyright ArborWay, Inc. Cambridge, Mass., Jan. 3, 1998.
The present invention relates to computer software used to build and maintain a menu system and, more specifically, it relates to a menu management system that enables a developer to generate a tab list menu and link it to an existing menu system.
A hierarchical menu system organizes information under a series of nested topics, so end-users can navigate down its lists to the reach information they need. Help systems represent, perhaps, the most prevalent and easily recognized application of this type of menu. Yet, prior to Zellweger (U.S. Pat. No. 5,630,125), menu paths in these systems have always been mutually exclusive because all prior menu authoring system art was based on the binary search tree. Zellweger""s authoring system and its underlying data structure, the open hierarchical data structure art, on the other hand, enables multiple paths to reach the same information.
In a menu authoring system the underlying data structure organizes information and arranges its descriptive topics into a series of nested lists and paths. This includes data structures like the binary search tree, as well as Zellweger""s more flexible structure. When the menu developer is ready to build a hierarchical menu system, the data structure, again either a search tree or Zellweger""s structure, transforms these lists of nested topic lists into menu data used by the display system.
As these data structures are often scalable, there is no limit on the number of items in a topic list. Yet, these lists never grew too large, until U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,279,005 and 6,131,100 by Zellweger, because all data entry was made by hand. Zellweger""s disclosures show how to automatically generate networks of lists and paths from external sources of data such as database structures and specially prepared files. These methods automatically propagate Zellweger""s structure and thereby overcome a prior obstacle, expensive and labor intensive data entry.
Mapping database values into a menu data structure in a automatic fashion creates new challenges for its menu end-users, especially when these list menus can get exceptionally large. Previously, the number of entries in each list menu was under a degree of control because it was always built by hand. Automation removes this level of control, and produces list menus that can contain hundreds, if not thousands of entries that make scrolling for a particular entry extremely tedious. To combat this problem, the present invention discloses ways to automate the generation of a tab list menu that in many respects, corresponds to a thumbnail tab in a book, its paper counterpart.
Tchao et. al (Apr. 28, 1998 U.S. Pat. No. 5,745,716) discloses a type of electronic tab displayed on a monitor of a hand-held computer device. Each tab represents a subset of items in a larger list. The user interface includes a display of the complete set of tabs and the capability of selecting a tab and cycling through items corresponding to the selected sublist. In contrast, the present invention is dedicated to a totally different type of user interface, nested list menus in a content menu, and a different retrieval objective, organizing information to link directly to each object.
The present invention discloses a menu authoring system that generates a tab list menu that links to a set of sublists which, previously, represented one long continuous list of menu items. With the present invention the menu developer has full control over how the original list is divided into intervals and how the tab menu list portray these divisions. Using an interactive configuration window the developer selects the source for these divisions, an alphabet list or the content itself, and can display the tab list menu prior to making permanent changes to the menu structure. The menu developer is free to select any list in a menu structure as a candidate for a tab list menu. When the new tab list menu is generated the present invention links this menu to the prior incoming and outgoing list objects.